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Comment by notahacker | Hacker News Reader

No, the question is whether Indians are free to choose to read things which are inconvenient to the Indian government [but not at all irksome to rich coastal Americans], or whether the Indian government gets to determine which information and ideas are allowed to be disseminated online in India. Facebook and Twitter seek only to control their own, separate platforms.

(Plus of course what will actually happen is that Facebook and Twitter will comply, and Indian users of those platforms will be subject to both the whims of California-based moderators and the Indian government's current penchant for objecting to pictures of funerals and suggestions they might not be doing a wonderful job. The potency of control of information and ideas in action; nobody in the upper echelons of the Indian government cares about Zuckerberg's policy on the lab-leak theory...)

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You're indulging in a huge fiction: that people freely choose what to read and what to believe. Your beliefs are a product of your environment, and your environment was traditionally mostly your family and broader community and country, but today your environment includes massive online oligopolies that have extreme power due to network effects.

If your country is consuming information through the filter of the American coastal elite, then they are likely to come to believe in the things that the American elite believes, to despise the things that the American elite despises. We can meaningfully speak of individuals having a choice to believe this or that, but as a society, that kind of domination of information will predictably drive people to believe what they are told to believe.

None of which changes the fact that what is actually happening is that the Indian government is the one seeking to dominate information to drive Indians to believe what they are told to believe.

It cares not in the slightest whether Indians get access to things Facebook cares to censor (which they can anyway, through the large majority of Indian media Facebook does not influence or seek to influence) but is determined to browbeat Facebook into removing evidence that the Indian government's handling of COVID might be suboptimal. This is the purpose of the policy. Reinstating posts on lab leak theories is not the purpose of the policy, and the American coastal elite (or Bangalore tech elite) will continue to censor stuff they want to on their platforms in addition to the more pervasive and more universal Indian-government censorship.

Takes a remarkable degree of dishonesty to make freedom of thought arguments in favour of the Indian government being able to prevent any material it does not agree with from reaching Indian eyeballs.

American big-tech deciding what's bad is much worse that than Indian government trying to dominate them. These companies are also not a single point of information for most of the people. Indians can still get government critical news from news sites.

Indians cannot get news critical of the government from companies within India. They have various tools and methods to harass Indian media into submission, that is simply not available against international media.

The reason for the ban is obvious. Twitter tagged propaganda by the government as fake news.

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